


Her Portrait in Blistered Gold

by Taste_of_Suburbia



Series: an unquiet mind [6]
Category: From Paris with Love (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Creatures & Monsters, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Hunters, Blood and Gore, Case Fic, Fluff, Ghosts, Haunted Houses, Horror, Hunters & Hunting, In Another Man's Shoes, Light Angst, M/M, Partners to Lovers, Possession, Prophetic Visions, Romance, Teasing, Trope Bingo Round 12, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-07
Updated: 2019-06-07
Packaged: 2020-04-11 23:57:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19120360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Taste_of_Suburbia/pseuds/Taste_of_Suburbia
Summary: In which Wax repeatedly drives on the wrong side of the road, two werewolf hunters have a lifetime’s worth of fish and chips in a mere week’s time and Reece can’t stop thinking like awoman,in theeighteen hundreds?





	Her Portrait in Blistered Gold

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fill on my Trope Bingo [card](https://immolate-the-silence.dreamwidth.org/30129.html) for ‘In Another Man’s Shoes.’ 
> 
> Lyrics are from Lifehouse’s ‘Somebody Else’s Song.’
> 
>  **Series:** This is set in the same Monsters/Hunters world that my other From Paris With Love fics are set in (‘The Skin Job’, ‘Hang Tight’, ‘murky like my heart,’ ‘we’re higher than our silence and deeper than our violence’ and ‘feel me in the saturation when the sun burns out’). At the moment, they’re not ranked in any specific order and you don’t really need to read one before the others. 
> 
> Essentially, Reece and Wax work for a secret government agency that hunts down all manner of monsters who prey on humans. They are both the investigators and the hunters, the only ones who have the skill-set to find out what they’re hunting and then kill it. Reece, like in the film, is more by the books and doesn’t fool around. While Wax, also like in the film, figures you might as well have a little fun while you’re discovering all manner of nasty things. In addition, Reece has these sort of prophetic visions that help them discover and solve cases.

 

_~Feeling like I’m chasing, like I’m facing myself alone_

_I’ve got somebody else’s thoughts in my head_

_I want some of my own~_

* * *

 

“I can’t get used to driving on the other side of the road,” Wax complained, once more swerving left - though even more ungracefully this time - and back into his rightful lane. It was amazing that they hadn’t yet been in a car accident, even though they’d already been in London for a week and a half.

Reece thought it best not to freak out or grumble about the beating his arm was taking, repeatedly being smashed against the passenger side door. “Why don’t you just let me drive then? You know I lived in London for a year.”

“Yeah,” Wax quipped. “Your little study abroad stint back in the golden years, huh? They tell you where to get good fish and chips too? ‘Cause I’m starved.”

What was it with Wax and  _food?_

Reece rolled his eyes and worked through the vision in his head again, or at least the  _details._ He strolled through the five foot wide doorway and greeted the lavishly crafted, wonderfully crowded grand ballroom. 

Except, it wasn’t really…  _him._

The elegant sweep of a rose hued gown, daintily brushing against the opulent tile. A white gloved hand making the usual rounds, cupped in dozens of envious hands before the night was through. A momentary glimpse of serenity as a scarred hand cupped her back, bringing with it a smile beaming brighter than the chandeliers overhead. Dizzying swirls of color: red and gold and royal blue. Distant snatches of laughter until they surrendered under a heavy veil of silence. A drop of blood on a discarded white glove under a lone, flickering candle, a second drop following and another and another…

Of course, it wasn’t just the images that weren’t Reece’s own but the  _thoughts_ too, the descriptions and the emotions behind them because Reece such as hell wasn’t a woman, using words like elegant and daintily and serenity. 

Reece resented that too, that he couldn’t even make up his own mind about what he was being forced to see but that someone was narrating the story  _for_ him. 

“You’re lookin’ pretty pissed off over there, Reece, with your face all pinchy.” Wax mimicked how  _apparently_ he thought Reece looked and the latter crossed his arms and slouched in his seat, ignoring his partner’s laughter and already embracing the close of this case.

* * *

 

Werewolves hadn’t  _exactly_ led them to London. 

Sure, there wasn’t much else that could rip out their poor victims’ throats quite like a werewolf could, but Reece’s visions didn’t actually consist of fur or claws or fangs or insatiable appetites.

They were only filled with  _her._

The lady brandished in rose and gold from head to toe. She was a widow but how full of  _life_ she was, how lustful and sociable, flitting from couple to couple whether they were drinking or dancing or merely standing stock still and gazing at her uncommon youthfulness and beauty. She couldn’t have been more than thirty and she was already a widow, her laughter sharpened by her years, her smiles selective due to her experience, her forcefulness over the room and over  _him_ powerful enough to keep Reece out of his own mind for quite a while after each vision of her, as if his life could never even begin to compare to the grace of hers. 

He didn’t know how he could be in love with her, someone who had lived more than two hundred years earlier, but he was.

And he suspected that, somehow,  _she_ had a hand in it. 

Sometimes her laughter sounded like it was all for him.  _Come, come see me, come live in me and I will show you the whole world in just one night. Come with me. Fall into me._

And Wax expected him to plug right back into reality with the flick of a switch?

The visions of her had led them all the way across the English Channel, no knowledge of what they were hunting, just a creeping dread of how she would become a victim given it was an inevitable fate for everyone in Reece’s visions.

Her throat being ripped out, blood soaking his (her) face, didn’t come until much later.

* * *

 

By some lightning stroke of luck her immaculate though decaying mansion was still standing, overgrown gardens and crumbling brickwork and all, looked after by staff nearly as old and decrepit. There were more curtains and rugs and tapestries than furniture in the dozens of rooms they passed through. As much of it as Reece recognized from her sweeping through it, from her guiding  _him_ through it, nothing sent him reeling quite as much as the ballroom did. 

Instinctively, needing to be away from prying eyes, he hid like a child, behind a curtain no less as agony hammered at his limbs and coursed like poison through his veins and breathing became more like a stroke of luck or a privilege than an entirely necessary human right.

_Please,_ Reece prayed and he  _certainly_ wasn’t the praying type.  _Please, God, just let this pain pass. I’ll do anything. Just let it ease._

Gradually, it did. As ache by ache dissipated, more and more of Reece’s composure returned, permitting him to suck in a deep breath and lean back against the wall more steadily. He shut his eyes, silently willing his heartbeat to slow down, reminding himself to take it easy should the pain in his chest - clawing to get at his heart - and the terrifying numbness that had eventually settled in his limbs returned.

And that was the moment Wax chose to pull back the curtain and startle him to death.

Reece jumped, hunching himself down over his knees and ignoring his partner necessarily, for the moment, fingers grasping his scalp tightly as he again prayed to God or the visions or whoever to let him return to his own body. Luckily, they didn’t fight him on that.

“You get anything new?”

“No,” Reece moaned, straightening himself little by little until he didn’t feel as if he was on the verge of toppling over anymore. A hand came to rest at his back and Reece jerked away from it, cursing at the sharp twinge in his right arm as he did so. “I’m fine, Wax. Is it too much to ask for two goddamn minutes?”  _Where you’re not breathing down my neck and demanding answers?_

Wax backed off, though Reece didn’t miss the flicker of hurt that crossed his face; he just ignored it in disbelief that it was there at all. “Calvary’s here. Or about to be anyway, so we should head out whenever you can stand up straight.” Their lack of credentials accounted for that, no doubt, because sometimes what the agency provided them with was a decade or two old,  _best_ case scenario. 

Reece gritted his teeth and pushed away from the wall. “I  _am_ standing up straight.” He followed Wax down the winding corridors, unable to fathom how anyone could possibly remember a way out of this maze-like fortress. Except, oh yeah, his visions probably would have led him straight out if he was willing to tune back into them, which he wasn’t. 

He heard sirens off in the distance, though it was almost like they were being filtered through water. His sense of reality wobbled and teetered, hands grasping the walls for balance as he rushed after Wax only to find peeling wallpaper and patches of carpet bunched up under his unsteady feet, her laughter like a trickle of water through his consciousness, a swish of gold at the corner of his eye, a touch of small fingers as they momentarily grasped his own.

If she was leading him this way, then it was the right way.

Wax, probably realizing there was no way out without the likely probability of getting caught, grabbed Reece’s tingling arm and pulled him inside a hidden room, no handle, no outline of a door, no reason for Wax to believe it should have been there at all. Reece threw him a ‘you’re not that good’ look and Wax shrugged. “I knew memorizing that old, decrepit ass map was going to come in handy,” he murmured, quietly locking the door behind them and then  _finally_ letting Reece go. Reece briefly recalled the small, hardbound book he had pulled from one particular area of a bookshelf, a piece of parchment fluttering to the floor upon its being opened.  _She_ had led him to that too. 

And how many more secrets would she have before their job was through?

Reece stumbled through the impenetrable darkness before realizing he wasn’t in the eighteen hundreds and had a perfectly good flashlight in his jacket pocket. He had to think for a long moment about how to turn it on and how exactly it worked, but the small beam of blinding light brought everything into stark focus again.

All of it.

Like how Reece wasn’t a blushing female obsessed with balls and ball gowns and card games and secret, nightly forays into occupied, candlelit rooms. Like how he wasn’t possibly hours away from getting his own throat torn out. Like how he wasn’t desperately in love with a man whose smile was the light of his whole world because that smile - belonging to a face Reece himself had never seen -  _wasn’t_ the light of his whole world. 

It wasn’t Reece’s world.

He shivered in the inhumane chill of the room and willingly handed the flashlight over to Wax when he made a grab for it.  _You’re Reece. James Reece. And this here is your know-it-all, food loving, trigger happy,_ asshole  _partner Charlie Wax._

Maybe being that woman wasn’t such a bad thing, after all; she  _did_ have fun every night. Except for her throat getting ripped out by some hungry werewolf. 

“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” Wax breathed and Reece turned.

The portraits on the wall weren’t exactly  _innocent._ Reece devoured them in mere seconds: the fine, delicate lines and fat, gruesome brush strokes. The naked women in erotic scenes of mid-pleasure: throats exposed, mouths gaping, eyes wide and heads tossed back with unending long, flowing hair, shocked and aroused and impassioned as bodices were torn from their plump forms and tossed aside, as already spilled blood framed their breasts and curved tauntingly down to their exposed lower extremities. Reece averted his eyes. 

It wasn’t  _just_ the blood however; Reece had seen blood in portraits before, maybe not quite like this but no less startling all the same. 

No, these images, these  _truths_ he had never seen captured in paint before. 

There were men in mid-transformation, human limbs clutching their prized victims yet coarse hair creeping up contorted necks and beastly, wolf-like snouts the spitting image of the one Reece had seen in his last vision. There were wolves prowling battlegrounds, feasting on the already perished or near dead, fangs tearing flesh, howls seeming to reverberate throughout Reece’s very soul, fighting for purchase.

That smile: too white, too blinding, wolfish.

_He_ , her lover, had been the one to tear her throat out. 

But she had  _known_ what he was. 

Again, Wax beat him to it. “There’s more in here than just art, cowboy. Take a look.” Once more Reece followed the beam of the flashlight, took in the overwhelming array of dresses tossed over bits and pieces of furniture, covering fallen or discarded portraits, even sickeningly framed themselves, gowns in every color imaginable all strewn with or doused in blood, some more torn and shredded than others but all a testament to what he and Wax had stumbled into.

Some sick fantasy, some shrine of evil, some torture chamber of old.

Reece gagged before two piercing wolf eyes in a low hanging portrait claimed his attention.

“She wasn’t a victim,” Reece expressed, beyond horrified and disgusted and claustrophobic. “She was an enabler.”

“A huntress.” Wax lowered the flashlight and Reece was grateful, if only so that the queasy sensation in his stomach wouldn’t worsen. “Are you sure she’s not one herself, Reece?” Female werewolves were rare, but that didn’t mean that none had ever existed. Legends mostly, ones that had been able to survive the ritual pain of their transformations.

He didn’t know,  _couldn’t_ know, not unless she told him. 

“The man in my vision, Wax,” he admitted, having finally pieced the mystery together and also coming to the conclusion that he would rather not have done so. “The man…  _werewolf_ who tore her throat out…”

“The werewolf she  _wanted_ her throat torn out by,” Wax corrected. 

“Yeah. He was her  _husband_ , Wax. I always thought she was a widow because that was what she  _showed_ me, but werewolves technically die before their first transformation, so it would have been a kind of death. A death of his humanity. She knew what he had become and only played the part of widow. She kept him alive by feeding him because she  _loved_ him. All that I’ve been feeling this whole time was her happiness, right up until he tore her throat out and then… nothing.”

Wax flicked the flashlight back on but kept it fixed on the carpet beneath them. “Bitch got what she deserved. What  _still_ needs to be explained is what the hell we’re here for, ‘cause she sure as shit doesn’t need avenging. Even if I  _was_ inclined to take pity on her, which I’m not, fact is we’re here two hundred years too late.” Because werewolves were cursed with human years, after all. 

And then, surrounded by all of her treasures, a flicker of light came to Reece.

“She wants this room destroyed, Wax. Burned. The paintings, the dresses, all of it.”

“Why?”

And another flicker. “That was why he tore her throat out! It couldn’t have been guilt or regret on her part, she’s just too happy for that, Wax.”

“Shhh!” Wax swore, pressing his head against the only door allowing them passage out, despite that Reece could hear nothing. Even still, Wax’s gaze was trained on him, curious but deeply concerned, staring at Reece like he was about to slit his throat or do something equally insane at any moment. He got like this sometimes when Reece talked about his visions, a territory he could never join Reece in, one step closer to madness that their livelihood and the world depended on, but unpredictable, dangerous madness none the less.

And yet another flicker. “So that means that she wanted him to bite her,  _turn_ her. But he wouldn’t do it, Wax. She didn’t care, she loved him, wanted to be with him forever. Even though their lifespans would be the same she would never be free, always be branded as a widow, always be expected to remarry. He didn’t want to inflict his curse on her but  _she_ wanted it. She was so happy because she believed that he was going to give into her, but he never did, he killed her instead, killed her to spare her.”

The warmth and chill she doused him in at odd and unpredictable intervals, persisting in hovering inside him, led Reece to the conclusion that all of his assumptions were correct, that the story he had weaved was uniquely her own, that her joy still lingered here, in this room of ages old brutality, even while she wanted to wipe all trace of her husband away.

_Why?_ He asked her.  _Why_ not  _let the world know?_ Not that he and Wax could allow it; a large part of their job was the immaculate cover up, but that wasn’t the point. 

_It has died with him,_ she reasoned.  _It is what he wanted. He let me go but I could not let go. And that is why I still linger here, a ghost, a mere memory._

_It hasn’t though,_ he countered.  _There are others out there, other werewolves, and I hunt them._

A bitter taste of sadness crept through him.  _Even so. It is done. Let me fade and let my home crumble. Thank you for the company, James._

She let Reece be then, floated out of him so suddenly he gasped out loud in shock. She left nothing but happiness in her wake, happiness and  _peace._ It felt strange to have his own body back again, to know that she would no longer inhabit him, that her thoughts would no longer mingle with his nor sway his own line of thought and unbending code of morality. 

And yet… he felt  _sorry_ for her. 

“Wax,” he pressed. “We need to destroy all record of her. This isn’t something the world needs to see. She brought us here to end it, to cast her even further into obscurity.”

His partner, as if convinced Reece was out of the danger zone, or whatever he called it away from Reece’s uninterested ears, crept back towards him, not stopping until his hands rested on Reece’s shoulders. A wave of exhaustion came with the touch, firmly cementing Reece back into his own reality and not hers. “We will,” Wax reassured. “As soon as some of the police spread out a bit, as soon as most of them hightail it.”

Not more than forty-five minutes later, all record of her beyond her glittering ballroom was engulfed in ravenous flames.

* * *

 

This particular part of the museum was closed down for yearly maintenance. Reece read the sign stating as much to Wax as his partner led him deeper into the finely lavished room, as if Wax wasn’t capable of reading it. With how often his partner  _actually_ followed the rules, it was probably better to assume that he couldn’t read. 

“Wax, come on, the case is over, let’s just… I thought you hated dusty old museums…?” Wax  _did_ hate dusty old museums, always claiming he could hardly endure pouring through ancient texts, let alone subjecting himself to centuries old sculpture and art for  _fun_ . Reece, on the other hand, tended to like museums and history in general, though he figured he’d had more than enough of it for a  _long_ while since arriving in London.

Consumed with the danger of getting caught, angered by Wax’s tight, insistent hold on his wrist, Reece was too preoccupied to realize where Wax was taking him, too sure of himself and Wax’s lack of interest in anything _not_ having to do with food or guns or women to realize what his partner’s intentions were. 

Wax turned without ample warning and kissed him, easy and slow and deep, burning like fire down Reece’s throat, pooling in his gut until he was the furthest thing away from pain, until visions and ancient justifications and gruesome paintings and medieval dresses were the last things on his mind. Gone were the cloying scents of perfumes and the choking scent of desperation and gone was the scent of  _her_ , unlike any other, and here was the malt vinegar on Wax’s breath mixed with a hurried breath mint, not as unpleasant as it sounded, and here was Wax’s greedy tongue making Reece hold onto him for dear life. 

And with a flash of movement, the curtains - having been only partially obscuring them - closed.

**FIN**

 

 


End file.
